Lucid Motors‘ director of cost engineering said the company’s upcoming Cosmos midsize SUV uses approximately half the wire count of a comparably equipped Chinese model.
Additionally, the EV maker achieved a wire harness cost target set at 40% of the company’s existing models, Lucid Air and Lucid Gravity.
Cory Steuben, who joined Lucid in 2023 after serving as president of teardown benchmarking firm Munro & Associates, detailed the Cosmos cost architecture in an interview posted on Wednesday with Munro Live — his former employer’s YouTube channel.
On March 12, in a conversation between interim CEO and Deutsche Bank analyst Edison Yu, Marc Winterhoff said that Cosmo’s bill of materials (BOM) is lower than a comparable midsize CUV from a Chinese rival.
The Wiring Claim
In the Munro interview, Steuben described the Cosmos wiring architecture as one of the platform’s most significant cost achievements.
“The target I set for the wire harnesses on midsize was about 40% of what we’re paying on Air and Gravity,” he said. “People said, ‘No way — what planet are we going to be on where we hit that?’ We even baked in some risk along the way. Lo and behold, we believe we got there.”
The result, Steuben said, is “a wire count about half that of a similarly contented Chinese competitor” — without naming any rivals.
The platform uses approximately 1,100 wires in total and only three electronic control units — compared to twelve in the Gravity SUV.
The reduction was achieved through a centralised “super gateway” mounted on the firewall, with aggregators positioned in the engine bay, behind the dash, and in the cabin.
Door and seat harnesses plug directly into aggregators rather than routing through inline connectors in the main body harness.
“We didn’t want to overburden our manufacturing team with a large body harness that has to feed through a small grommet,” Steuben said. “The result is extremely small bundle sizes.”
Other wire elimination measures included replacing shielded twisted pairs with unshielded ones where noise isolation was not required, and rethinking the protocol that governs how modules wake each other up — cutting 10 to 15 wires from that single change.
Jordan, the Munro Live host, called the reduction “enormous” and noted that in pillar cross-sections affecting visibility and ingress, packaging is “fought in fractions of millimetres, not feet.”
“Will a customer in a Gravity or Cosmos actually care how many wires are running through the car?” Steuben said. “I don’t think so. But what it allows us to do is save that money and redeploy it into a feature or piece of content they will value.”
Steuben spent nearly two decades at Munro & Associates, rising to president and co-creating the Munro Live YouTube channel.
He joined Lucid in September 2023 as assistant chief engineer for the midsize platform before transitioning to lead cost engineering across the Air, Gravity, and midsize programmes.
Lucid‘s director engineer leads a team of more than 20, “more than two-thirds of them cost engineers and estimators,” providing weekly should-cost updates as design changes roll through.
69 kWh for 300 Miles
Steuben confirmed on the record that the Cosmos platform requires a 69 kWh battery pack to deliver approximately 300 miles of range.
“In the investor day deck shown by Emad and Zack Walker, there’s a slide showing we only need 69 kWh to go roughly 300 miles,” he said. “That means we spend less money on battery cells, which we can redeploy into better attributes, more content for the customer, or more value for investors — typically a blend.”
The 69 kWh figure is based on the platform’s target efficiency of 4.3 to 4.5 miles per kilowatt-hour.
Lucid said at the March 12 event that to deliver the same 300-mile range, battery cell costs would be $2,000 higher for Chinese OEMs, $1,500 higher for German OEMs, and $500 higher for US competitors.
Atlas Drive Unit
On the next-generation Atlas electric drive unit — a ground-up redesign of the Zeus unit used in the Air and Gravity — Steuben said the powertrain team approached the project from first principles.
“If you’ve seen a Zeus centre differential, it has a lot of gears — four little gears and the cross. It’s intricate and we’re proud of it, but they approached Atlas from first principles: do we really need four? No — you can use two if you size the centre shaft appropriately for the application loads,” he said.
Other cost reductions included integrating the oil pump’s control circuitry into the existing drive unit control board — eliminating a separate printed circuit board assembly — and shifting gear assembly from a side-loaded to a top-down approach.
Atlas uses identical front and rear housings and mounts, with an induction motor at the front and a permanent magnet motor at the rear.
“I gave a pretty aggressive target,” Steuben said of the Atlas drive unit cost. “I’m happy to say that as the design evolved, we hit or exceeded it.”
Chief engineer Zach Walker said at Investor Day that Atlas has 30% fewer parts, 23% less weight, and 37% lower bill of materials than Zeus, and is 40% more power-dense than its closest competitor.
The Munro Live host described Lucid‘s claim that the Cosmos programme is landing “at or near should-cost predictions across the board” as “incredibly rare” in the automotive industry, noting that should-cost models assume near-ideal sourcing, minimal waste, and lean indirect headcount.
Steuben said his team recommended a $59 cost target for one particular system.
“The team here pushed back hard — they thought $120 to $150 was more realistic at our planned volumes,” he said. “I sat in the sourcing meeting where we sourced that system within two cents of the target, and we’re cutting tools.”
Design for Cost
Steuben said the Cosmos team established material, fastener, and driver-strategy guardrails before parts were designed.
A core list of approved materials — with all testing and standards already completed — was locked in early, and any non-standard material request required justification.
He drew on his Munro background to challenge engineering assumptions throughout the programme.
“If exterior came in and said, ‘We have seven clips on this trim piece because that’s our standard,’ I’d ask whether they’d benchmarked the competition,” he said. “They’d come back surprised they had to justify each clip.”
On packaging, he described a “relentless pursuit” of low step-over height and maximised vision angles.
“Some competitors in the US have very tall sill sections and very tall battery stack heights. We didn’t want to compromise there,” he said.
The compact Atlas drive unit enabled additional rear cargo space. Steuben noted that if the unit were taller — “and you can pull stack heights from any benchmarking site, most are taller than ours” — “that piece of luggage would be 50 to 100 mm higher. Less value to the customer.”
Lucid‘s director praised the company’s third model, the first of three vehicles that are built under the same midsize platform.
“I want the world to know that midsize is truly the next step for Lucid — well thought through across many facets, our high-volume, high-value vehicle,” Steuben said. “I want one now.”
Lucid‘s stock opened Thursday’s session lower dropping to $8.65, only three cents above the new record low hit earlier this week.
As of press time, shares of the premium EV brand had erased intraday losses and were trading nearly 1% higher at $8.92.
